A woman recalls the freedom and power of childhood games; a surprise anniversary party goes awry when the husband is hospitalized and the fault lines and strengths of a family are laid bare; a teacher rediscovers her calling amidst unthinkable tragedy; a lonely woman recognizes her responsibility to her sister's troubled life-in this collection of stories the prose and passion of life are brought together in ways that show both the complexity and the simplicity of living. Told against a Midwest background, they focus mainly on women's experiences, yet nonetheless reflect universal conditions. This is what makes Karen Gettert Shoemaker's style so affecting and her stories so appealing. These stories show the importance of knowing the preciousness of this life, whatever form it takes. These are simple stories, told with a grace and elegance that belies their joyful art and craft. "Crafted with care and grace. This book establishes Shoemaker as a talented chronicler of rural life and domestic gestures, with an eye for what's funny in grief, and what's sad in humor."-Publishers Weekly "Short stories at their finest can be the ultimate in fiction: compressed gems that in a few words can create memorable people and emotions out of thin air. Shoemaker's first collection contains such, and readers will laugh and cry at her spare portrayals of loss and friendship... . This is a powerful and valuable collection."-Library Journal
Night Sounds and Other Stories
By Karen Gettert Shoemaker
DUFOUR EDITIONS
Copyright © 2002 Karen Gettert Shoemaker.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8023-1337-X
Chapter One
PLAYING HORSES
The first time Bobbi came back for a visit, my mother warned me she might have outgrown me. "She might have matured faster than you did," were her exact words. I was helping her hang the wash on the line that stretched across the back yard when she told me this. As always, I was in charge of clothespins. I straddled a little red wagon and scootched along behind her, imagining the wagon a prairie schooner and the wet clothes around me canyon walls. I didn't answer her. I just handed her another clothespin and thought about Bobbi's visit.
In her latest letter she had told me she was going to bring pictures of the horses in the field across from her house.
"I wake up every morning and first thing I do is look out and see them in the field. I always pretend that the palomino is mine and the big black one is yours because I know how much you like black horses," she had written. She didn't sound any different than when she left. Even though my Mom said she probably was a whole lot more grown up than I was I went on planning her visit as if she were still my best friend. Just as she had been when she moved away.
The neighborhood where Bobbi and I had been friends was full of kids but few friends. My family lived in a rundown house with a big yard that wrapped around the last house on the block like the cookie that's left after the bite. On one side we looked toward a trailer court, on the other toward rentals in varying degrees of disrepair. Both of those views were superior to what adjoined us on the north. On that side, across a narrow alley, was our little town's little slum. Nine or ten houses on one block that we all called, for reasons that still escape me, "Goat Alley." We were better than anybody on that street, and on the other streets most people moved in and out so fast we hardly had time to get to know them.
Only three families stayed in our neighborhood for any length of time and we had something like sixteen or seventeen kids between us. The neighborhood felt full and we all felt we belonged to something bigger than ourselves. We weren't much. We didn't love each other intensely or even like each other all that much all the time. But we were familiar to one another and that seemed to count for something. When the chill wind of winter blew into town we knew we could count on one another to show up next summer for the next baseball season. We could trust one another to remember who hit a home run and who had to climb over Old Man Ogden's fence to retrieve the lucky ball.
On the other hand, rental people came and went in no discernible pattern, and you couldn't be sure they would be there next week much less next season, so what was the point of them? You might play hide and seek with them some evening, or let them in on neighborhood games just to even up sides when necessary, but if push came to shove, it was us against them. We were a team and no rental kid was going to get in on that solid front. We even made up a rule just so they would know their place. We said, loudly and often, that you couldn't be a real neighbor until you had lived in your house for five years.
Okay, so we weren't much. We knew that. There's an ugliness that comes with that kind of knowing. It wasn't that we had a leader we followed into trouble, it was that we didn't and so we sometimes followed a base instinct to be better than something. If it hadn't been rental kids it would have been something else. Each other maybe. Probably.
All our parents worked during the day. In the early days of the neighborhood there may have been some kind of day care arrangements, but by the time I came along the authority figure in most households was an older brother or sister. If we were alive at the end of the day they had lived up to their responsibility.
Once, on one of those long unsupervised days, my brother and one of neighbor boys decided they didn't want us girls playing in the same yard they were in. They told us to "Get out or die."
Mary and Lucy yelled a few names at them, used words they shouldn't have even known, but they did it over their shoulders on their way to another yard. I don't know if I was being stupid that day or rebellious or what, but I said no, I wasn't going anywhere. We were there first.
"Anyway, it's my yard and you can't make me leave," I said. I sat down on the grass to prove my point.
The boys just looked at each other and laughed. They didn't say anything to each other. They just knew what to do.
My brother grabbed one ankle and the neighbor boy grabbed the other.
"You're gonna wish you left when you had the chance," one of them said. Then they took off running.
I wasn't much more than nine at the time and my little girl body wasn't much weight for two teenage boys. They ran through the garden where last year's cornstalks stuck up from the ground like spikes. They didn't slow down until they got to the gravel driveway and then only because they were laughing so hard they couldn't run anymore. I screamed the whole time and that seemed to make it funnier.
When I rolled over to stand up the sight of my bloody back scared them into silence.
"Oh shit, we're dead," one of them said finally and then the neighbor boy took off as if there was someplace to hide in this neighborhood.
My brother knew there was no where to go and at first he just stood there staring at me, saying, "Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit."
I know it was fear of the punishment in store for him that made him help me into the house, but I also know there was remorse, kindness even, in his touch when he washed my back, carefully wiping away the mud, cleaning the cuts with peroxide. He kept saying, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." And I kept crying. "It hurts. It hurts."
Maybe I should have forgiven him. He looked so sorry standing there with that bloody wash cloth in his hand and his touch on my back was so soft it felt like love. But when I turned around and gingerly pulled my shirt down he said, "Don't tell Dad." Just because it feels like love doesn't mean it is.
I did tell Dad, and when my brother got the belt that night I plugged my ears and didn't cry. My Dad couldn't do anything about the neighbor boy, but the boy didn't know that. He stayed away from our house for a month after that.
As I said, we weren't much, and we knew it. But we weren't rental kids either, so we had something to stand on. Looking back at all this, at the run-down state of all our houses and the little secrets we hid behind closed doors, it is downright shocking that we had the gall to affect snobbishness.
But affect it we did, and that's the world Bobbi dropped into when her Mom and Dad dropped their double wide in the corner of what was supposed to be our baseball field. No one in the neighborhood was going to ever forgive the Kellers for messing up a perfectly good baseball field, and until that summer I didn't know I could do anything different than what the neighborhood did. For three whole weeks after they moved in, Mary, Lucy, and I made a point of not playing with Bobbi. We played right in front of her house just so she would know we weren't playing with her. We would take sticks out of her yard to draw hopscotch squares in the dirt road in front of her house. When suppertime came we threw our stones into her yard like so much trash. I can still see her small white face peering out the window at us. Watching while we pretended she didn't exist.
It would be easy to paint Bobbi as some kind of savior in this scene, some kind of second—better—part of me, but that wouldn't be completely honest. She was just a girl my age that lived near me for a while. In the way of proximity we became friends, in the way of young girls we became Best Friends.
I'm not sure where Mary and Lucy were that day I first talked to Bobbi. I just remember that I was alone and I was doing what I always did when no one was around—I was pretending to be a wild horse.
After all these years I can still recall how real my imagination made this game. Words just aren't enough to explain it and saying it now makes me laugh, but back then it was serious business. Our yard, the biggest in the neighborhood and with the most trees, was big enough to hold a tropical island, a mountain range, and high plains so wide you couldn't walk from one side to the other in a day's time. I didn't need Mary or Lucy. I didn't need anybody. I was a wild stallion, the fastest, strongest, wildest, most beautiful wild stallion that ever walked the earth. As a little girl I was timid and clumsy, but when I became a horse I became everything I ever knew about power and freedom.
Sometimes even now, when the late afternoon light is slanting just so across green space or through trees I can remember just exactly what it felt like to take on that magic. I can close my eyes, breathe deeply and feel my velvety nostrils flare, picking up the scent of danger, freedom.
That day, alone in my yard, in the small part between the house on the corner and the alley, I was running from wolves when suddenly I saw Bobbi across the street. She was leaping across fallen trees and dodging branches. She stopped and at first I thought she was looking at me, but then I realized she didn't see anything that was around her. She tossed her hair back and lifted her nose to the wind. I knew that movement like I knew the beating of my own heart. She was pretending to be a horse! I swear my ears pricked up, flickered in an attempt to hear her. Somehow or another I found myself across the street in her yard, and then we were in mine. We didn't talk that first day. Instead, we just raced and jumped and dodged, not needing to explain what we were running from or jumping over or dodging around. Like horses, we just knew. Isn't that what friendship is supposed to be?
That's what I thought, and more importantly, I believed it could stay that way. When Bobbi's anxiously awaited visit came I was standing on the porch waiting. As soon as I saw them pull up I raced out to the car to meet her. My mom frowned at my obviously childish behavior when I jumped off the porch, but I went right ahead and galloped toward the car. For her part, the allegedly more mature Bobbi came out of the car like a bronco out of a chute. We met at the end of the sidewalk and grabbed each other in a bear hug. Then we remembered how dumb we thought hugging was so we backed up and laughed.
Bobbi's Mom got out of the car then and walked up the walk to the house. My Mom met her halfway. I knew she didn't want her to come in because it was washday and she didn't like anyone to come in on washday. I was also aware that Mom had never, not once, invited Mrs. Keller into our house in the two years that they lived across the street. As far as I knew Mom had never been in the Keller's house, either.
Mrs. Keller stood there in front of my Mom, lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth. I knew Mom was not going to invite her in then. A smoking father was one thing, but a smoking mother? They stood together in that weird stiff way grown ups do when they don't like each other but don't want to admit it. Finally, Mrs. Keller said, "Well, I'll come back for Bobbi around 4:00."
She looked at us and said it again, as if we couldn't hear or understand the language she used when she talked to Mom. "I'll come back for you around 4:00, okay?"
"Okay!" Bobbi answered, and then she grabbed my hand and started to run. We were off like startled colts and suddenly it was as if she had never left.
Our play that day was as much like it had been the day we met as any two days could be. We raced and jumped and raced some more. I thought I was in heaven. No one else knew quite how to do this with such abandon as Bobbi did. The fabric of our imagination wore thin only once when I asked if she had remembered to bring the picture of the two horses that lived across the street from her house. She said there were no horses across the street from her house.
"God," she said, "I live in a city. It's not like this at all." Then she shook her head like a horse shaking off a fly and took off running again.
There have been moments in my life where everything becomes suddenly clear to me. Where one piece of information settles into place and completes the whole picture. This was not one of those times. In fact, it made no sense to me at all, so I chose to ignore it. Even later, when I went back over everything Bobbi said to me, looking for clues of what eventually occurred, I still couldn't make sense of this. When she left me, she left me, and that may be all I'm ever going to know.
The world Bobbi left behind was no city. At night through our open windows we could hear crickets and frogs and freight trains that sounded their whistles but didn't slow down when they passed through on the south edge of town. Car traffic on main street, two blocks away, settled down to almost nothing by about 10:00 most evenings, though it picked up a little on Friday and Saturday nights when the bars closed. Trucks were the constant. Day or night you could always hear an eighteen-wheeler gearing up somewhere.
My Dad drove a truck and so did about half the fathers and older brothers of everybody I knew. The sound of that rising shifting whine can still get to me, especially at night. I hear it and think somebody's leaving home. Somewhere there's a little girl at a window, watching taillights.
Every time before my Dad left I would beg him to bring home a horse for me. He hauled cattle so he had all the right equipment and went right up into the heart of cowboy country almost every week so how hard could it be to put just one horse in with the cows and bring it home? I explained how easy it would be for him to get the horse here and once it was here I could keep the horse in the playhouse out back. I would take care of it, I told him, honest I would.
This routine went on for years. Me begging, him ignoring. It got to be such a habit I forgot to stop when I realized I didn't really want a horse anymore. I came to that realization right before Christmas the year after Bobbi's first visit. I was writing a letter to her the moment it hit me. I remember writing, "Tonight, I'm going to tell my Dad he HAS to bring me a horse or I will die. I will. I know I'll die if I don't get a horse soon." As I re-read what I had written I realized it wasn't true. I wouldn't die if I didn't get a horse, I wouldn't even be all that upset.
Something about it scared me, I mean, who was I if I wasn't the lover of horses? I knew I was too tall to be racing around the yard kicking up my heels and pawing at the air with my fore hooves, but I still loved horses. Didn't I?
I was writing this letter to Bobbi when my Dad came home. As he sat at one end of the table pulling off his work boots I sat at the other writing my heart's desire as if by rote. I kept re-reading those words, "I'll die if I don't get a horse soon," and I couldn't even remember what it felt like to believe it. I felt older than I had ever felt before. My Dad sat across from me eating fried potatoes and chopped steak, oblivious to the change taking place across the table from him. The rest of the family had eaten hours ago, before Dad came home, so it was just he and I at the table. Mom was moving around the kitchen doing something that didn't interest me. Between bites he told her about his week. As was often the case, he would only be home long enough to eat, shower and refill his suitcase. This was the time I always made my plea. I let him leave the table and I put my letter in an envelope, licked it closed, and sat looking at it for a long time.
He was pulling on his coveralls before I said anything. He had the look of somebody already gone and I just wanted to say something to him to make this new feeling in me go away. I don't remember exactly what I said because it all came out in a rush, but my Mom heard the last part of it and the look on her face stopped me dead in my tracks.
"Don't ever say anything like that ever again!" she said. Dad didn't seem to hear either of us. He just kept leaving.
"I didn't mean I didn't want him to ever come home again," I whined. "I just want a horse really really bad."
"You! Go and think about what you just said." She turned her back on me and walked with Dad to the door. Good-byes were the only time I ever saw them kiss. This time she held on to his arm a little longer than usual, but other than that I figured it was just another night watching taillights.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Night Sounds and Other Stories by Karen Gettert Shoemaker. Copyright © 2002 by Karen Gettert Shoemaker. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
